Monday, March 20, 2006

After reading a post on TechCrunch about the release of Firefox 2.0 Alpha, I thought I'd check it out. No harm in testing a developer's release, right? Or so I thought. It turned out that it was only compatible with 1 of my 39 extensions (as of 1:00 PM EST today, excluding the DOM Inspector), that being BugMeNot, which is especially unuseful compared to some of my more vital extensions. So I decided that it would be best for me to wait for the final release. I go to uninstall it from the Add/Remove Programs utility, and apparently there's some misconfigured registry key or something that's preventing me from uninstalling it.

So, using System Restore, I revert my system to the squeaky-clean, un-Firefox2.0a'd way it was last night. Everything seems to be in order.

So, I'm finally back into 1.5.0.1. But when I launch the browser, none of my extensions are working! The extensions probably still think that it's using 2.0 and are therefore incompatible even though I'm actually using 1.5.

So after 3 1/2 hours, unnecessary stress, and tons of aggravation, I finally realize that from the downgrade back to 1.5.0.1, the extensions were left disabled (!), which is why they weren't working. This is terrible usability practice and something I hope they fix in the upcoming and future versions. It just goes to show you that all developers -- myself included -- should always make sure that the experience for their users is a positive one, otherwise users will become frustrated and dislike, or even distrust your product, even if it was unintentional on your part. Always make sure you follow good usability guidelines! :)

After re-enabling them all everything was (thankfully) back to the way it used to be.